Many people suffer from conditions that are described as psychophysiologic conditions. These conditions might be simply annoying, such as a lump in the throat, trembling hands, or profuse sweating. The conditions may also be debilitating to some degree, such as stiff muscles, sore back, or migraine headaches. More serious conditions might require treatment and therapy to maintain the person suffering from them functional.
Psychiatric treatment of such conditions is well known. Psychiatric treatment is usually required over an extended period of time, and it is very expensive. In psychiatric treatment a therapist helps the patient isolate the psychological basis for the problem and then facilitates the patient's insight to bring it into the patient's conscious awareness in such a manner that it can be dealt with successfully by the patient.
Usually it is difficult to isolate the psychological basis for a physiological condition. In all instances it requires prolonged discussion with the patient, and in many instances it is not within the patient's awareness at all. For example, a traumatizing experience could occur at a time in a patient's life that is earlier than he can remember -- such as when he is an infant of one year old. As another example, a traumatizing experience could affect a different part of the body than the one having the psychophysiological condition. An example of this might be a frightening experience of a patient when his hand was caught or restrained by another person, by an animal, or by a device. In freeing his hand in a frightening emergency, he would pull the hand abruptly away to effect its release, and this experience could be "remembered" by the back or shoulder muscles which were exerted strenuously to effect such a release of the caught hand. Such a traumatizing experience would be an experience associated primarily with the hand, but the physiologic condition that it causes could be a sore back or a chronic headache caused by tense back muscles restricting blood flow which would be causally associated with the traumatizing experience but affecting a different part of the body. This is particularly true if the experience were one from early childhood and the memory of it were repressed.
It is postulated that the body remembers traumatizing experiences by various means. For example, a traumatic experience involving a back muscle may be remembered by that back muscle remaining in an unnatural state of tension to be ready for another similar emergency, and the resultant tension may so restrict the flow of blood that the muscle involved, or even another part of the body, is affected by the diminished blood flow through the tense muscle. These "memories" cannot be dealt with by the patient unless they are brought to his conscious awareness. Thus, if the patient is aware that his back muscle is tense because of an old traumatic experience, he can deal with these alert defenses by consciously relaxing them which can be done effectively when the destructive consequences of the alertness are in the patient's conscious awareness.